Saudi Arabia, UAE to Release Joint Digital Currency

The central banks of Saudi Arabia and the UAE announced on Sunday their plans to jointly develop a new digital currency. The banks seeking to develop a technology, such as distributed ledgers, which can be used to manage digital currencies between the two central banks and banks participating in the initiative in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The''Aber'' project was announced in 2019 as part of Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s “Azzam” strategy, an agreement to foster bilateral cooperation to contribute in the body of knowledge in CBDC and DLT technologies.

The aim is to develop a cross-border payment system that will reduce transfer times and costs between banks in the two Gulf states.

Also, the solutions, results, and main lessons learned were all documented in Project "Aber" Report. With the project outputs, the report aims to significantly enrich knowledge content in this field, in addition to laying the foundations for future work to be explored in the coming years.

Moreover, the two central banks have in the past expressed scepticism about digital currencies such as bitcoin, with the UAE Central Bank reporting it did not recognise bitcoin as an official currency. Also, in July, the Saudi central bank warned against trading bitcoin because it was outside the bank's regulatory reach.